.. and eat your doggoned peas too

Do you remember the stories about schools sending letters home to the parents of fat kids? Obviously humiliating children into pursuing svelte culturally acceptable physiques did not work. Now, there are people who believe that fat children should be taken from their homes and their parents and placed into foster care until such time as they become acceptably lean. I believe that our nation’s first lady should be the first foster mother. Her eating habits set such a fine example for our children. As the President reminded us, it is time to for us to eat our peas. Does a ShackBurger have peas on it? Just asking.

These save the children from obesity advocates insist that allowing one to become chubby is child abuse. I agree. We should force feed them raw vegetables. No, that may not work. Raw vegetables create an abundance of methane and we could accelerate global warming, unless of course Al Gore can invent an adolescent fart catcher. These advocates for children’s health are the same bunch who will scream to high heaven to preserve a woman’s “legal choice” to kill an unborn child, but damn her for allowing a live child to eat a cupcake.

Frankly, I think these actions are way past due. We must get control of these parents who continually abuse their children with their poor choices. A good place to start is taking children away from people who mark their poor defenseless tots for life by naming them things like Dweezil. We need to take those kids from their nutty parents and keep them in a foster home until they are old enough to legally file for a name change. We are sure to save them from a lifetime of agony and clinical depression. Remember what happened to Johnny Cash when his daddy named him Sue? “I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.” If it was tough on Sue, can you imagine going through life being called a Dweezil? Yep, we must protect the children – it is off to foster care for Apple, Peaches Honeyblossom, Dixie Boo, Banjo…

But, let us not stop there. If parents smoke, legal smoking products that is, we should take away their children too. Children do imitate their parents and we must not let children learn how to smoke from watching their parents do it. Children should not be exposed to second hand smoke, unless it is of the medical variety particularly native to California. If they are in foster care, we can force them to look at pictures of people dying from respiratory illnesses and cancer. Oh, wait. Someone already had that idea.

Oh there is more. We should take defenseless children away from parents who give them Mohawk haircuts when they are three. Or who take pictures of them naked in the bathtub that can only ruin their lives posted on facebook when they are seventeen – or forty.

If your adolescent daughter hangs out at the mall, I mean literally hangs out, looking like a street hooker on the prowl; she should be in foster care. And her tattooed, eyebrow pierced brother with half his rear-end hanging out of his oversized jeans should be in there with her.

If a child comes to school and shares strange ideas with his schoolmates, like for instance Christianity or patriotism, straight to foster care. We cannot have parents radically indoctrinating their children with such crazy ideas. That is the job of the public school system, which also by the way has the opportunity to teach health and physical fitness. That is a nationwide failure that even the Atlanta school system cannot cover up.

Place aside the sarcasm for a moment. There once was a society that believed it could intercede where parents had failed. Its leader intended to build a perfect race starting with perfect children. Let us not start down that path, even as sincere as it might seem.